


La Chaleur

by Luna



Category: Atomic Blonde (2017)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Fix-It, Misses Clause Challenge, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-12 19:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12967173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luna/pseuds/Luna
Summary: Let them see that she is like the new map of Europe. Scars removed, scrubbed clean. Ready for a new future, a new name. Let them see that, and set her free.(Paris, the summer after.)





	La Chaleur

**Author's Note:**

  * For [teyla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/teyla/gifts).



> Beta by prosodiical. Happy Yuletide!

Paris in August is a breath that's been held too long. Sweet-rotten air, streets turning to rivers of melted tar. Iron railings and zinc rooftops, taking in so much heat from the sun that they burn all night. Closed shops, empty cafés--everyone who can escape the city has flown away.

Delphine, wings decidedly clipped, spends her days at a desk, alone.

She has been stuck in the records department since the Wall came down. Long enough to recover from her own untimely death. The bruises faded and the breaks healed; nothing remains but a fine red line across the base of her throat. She wears a silk scarf in the office, even in this weather. This is her penance.

Let them see that she is like the new map of Europe. Scars removed, scrubbed clean. Ready for a new future, a new name. Let them see that, and set her free.

For now, she sits at a desk. Pulls old files, barely classified, and cross-references them with even older ones. She types other agents' handwritten field notes. She's begun to drink rosé at lunch, like her mother; her life is that boring and that inconsequential.

At 18:00, she walks home, varying her route at random. Heading west, the fat sun bleeding out before her. Big dark glasses, Walkman riding her hip. Concrete Blonde, Bad Religion, Depeche Mode: _I'm waiting for the night to fall, when everything is bearable._ She rewinds the mixtape over and over.

Her flat is on the fifth floor, tucked right under the roof, the hottest room in the world. The first thing she does is check all her fail-safes to make sure no one has broken in. The second thing she does is take off her clothes. She stands in front of the open refrigerator in her lingerie, eating leftover noodles straight out of the carton, taking sips from the vodka bottle she keeps in the freezer. After a while she begins to feel the long dull day steaming off her skin. To feel alive--

Something is wrong.

Nothing so clear as a sound, nothing that registers to her eyes. Delphine just hits the ground, diving under the counter, coming up with her kitchen gun already cocked; she couldn't even say how she knows where to point it. The window to her left. The one that opens on the fire escape.

The blackout shade is down, and Delphine shoots through it. Exploding glass, a pattern of holes full of light--she's squeezed off three rounds without a pause. But there's no cry, no sound of a body falling. She goes low again, crawls across the floor, and edges up alongside the window. Chambers another bullet and waits, heart in her throat.

"Good girl," a voice says.

The accent is unplaceable, but the tone is familiar, cool and amused, a cat licking blood from its claws-- _her_ claws. Delphine yanks the edge of the torn shade, sends it whipping out of the way. She keeps the gun aimed and steady, unflinching as Lorraine Broughton swings herself over the iron railing of the fire escape. Stands there, framed by the broken window and the orange sky.

"Shoot first," she says. "Ask questions later."

Delphine shakes her head. Ask a question: give away more than you're likely to get. "You might have come to the door," she says, instead.

"Mm, I could have." Lorraine is wearing black despite the heat, a short dress and very tall boots, shoulders and arms bare and gleaming, sculptural. "But I thought you'd like a jolt of adrenaline."

So knowing, the way she says that--as if she's been watching every day, every single identical day, for all these months since Berlin--it makes Delphine feel more naked than she is, sweat tingling all over her skin. She motions with the gun. "Inside."

Lorraine smiles with only one corner of her mouth. She climbs in gracefully through the window, unbothered by the scattered shards of glass. She really could be carved from marble, except that Delphine remembers how hot she is to the touch. Their nights together in Berlin--they're burned into her sense memory, as deep as the pain of a wire wrapped around her neck, losing her breath, thinking: _the pill, break the tooth and swallow the pill, break the tooth and swallow the pill_ and then it all goes black--

She blinks. Lorraine is not a memory, or a nightmare; she does not disappear.

"I'm going to search you," Delphine says. Lorraine holds up her hands, palms open and empty. But Delphine looks beyond her to calculate the lines of sight from her fire escape to the street, the rooftops. "No," she says, lowering her gun. "not here."

So, into the tiny, windowless bathroom, a single hot light bulb and walls that Delphine painted red, a deep glossy shade that wouldn't show bloodstains. She closes the door and Lorraine turns--careful, no sudden movements--and lets Delphine take the gun from the holster at the small of her back. Then she stoops and draws a little .22 from the top of her boot.

A funny pulse of relief runs through Delphine's body. It's not because she's any safer now--Lorraine is just as dangerous unarmed--but because it's been so long since anyone saw her as a threat. She places the guns on the edge of the sink. "Are you wearing a wire?"

"No." Lorraine looks Delphine over, slow and shameless. "Are you?"

Delphine bites back a smile. "It doesn't matter," she says, and reaches into the shower stall to turn the water on. It's loud enough against the tiles to fuck up any microphone concealed on the body. She doesn't ask Lorraine to strip--it's good, though, knowing she could. "I heard you were working for the Soviets," she says.

"I heard you came back from the dead," Lorraine says.

"So I did." Delphine leans back against the closed door. "I was unconscious for three weeks. No brain damage, though. They said it was a medical miracle."

She hadn't even known what country she woke up in, and she couldn't ask--she couldn't speak. It had been days before her voice came back, a tiny ghost of a thing, and another week again before someone bothered to debrief her.

Delphine catches herself touching the scar on her neck. She drops her hand. "Did it take you this long to find out?"

"Longer than it should have," Lorraine says. Her hair looks a shade darker than it used to be, and softer, curling a little at the ends. The humidity. An illusion. "And they told you that I--"

"That you killed Percival?" Delphine does smile, now, allowing herself a moment of pure animal satisfaction. "You didn't do that for me."

"No. I would have killed him either way."

Their eyes lock. Lorraine's are the pale green of thin ice. She's telling the truth. The mystery is, what for? What could she possibly want from Delphine that hasn't already been taken away?

Impossibly, Lorraine blinks first. "It's fucking hot," she says. She turns toward the shower, cups her hands and lets the cold water fill them, and drinks. Does it again. Water trickling from between her fingers, beading in the hollow of her throat. She runs her wet hands over her face and through her hair.

"You could never have run a honey trap," Delphine says. "You've never looked harmless."

"You're more observant than most men."

She crosses her arms. "Not observant enough, it seems."

Lorraine studies her for a while, head tilted, lips pursed like she's holding something on her tongue, a pearl or poison. "Have you got a cigarette?"

"No," Delphine lies--they're in the kitchenette, and now she wants one desperately, damn it, but she refuses to move off the door.

Lorraine nods minutely. "Your people blamed you for the whole clusterfuck, didn't they?"

 _Your people_. Delphine could spit. "Don't worry, they saved a share for you."

"And you believe them?"

Delphine clenches her jaw. What she thinks--what she's been thinking about ever since _L'Affaire Spyglass_ \--is that it makes no difference whether Lorraine is a Soviet or an Allied agent. Those are just names for sides. Ideologies are nothing, countries are nothing, relationships are less than nothing. All that matters is winning the game.

If she'd realized that sooner, everything would be different--her life, the map of the world.

She glances at herself in the mirror above the sink. Flushed skin, wild black hair, her makeup blurred by heat and adrenaline and--yes--desire. She looks vulnerable. And sometimes you've got to work with what you have. She bites her lip gently, looks up at Lorraine through her eyelashes. "I believe them as much as I believe you."

"You shouldn't have been involved," Lorraine says.

Delphine suppresses a laugh, acid in her mouth. "Is that what you came here to tell me?"

"No."

"Good, because I think I'd have to shoot you." She'd hated that speech the first time she heard it, had buried her face in the sick-smelling hospital pillow, wishing she'd never woken up--

"Did you know I found your body?"

Delphine tenses, her spine turning to steel. Lorraine takes a step toward her. The light overhead casts sharp blades of shadow under her brows, her cheekbones, but her eyes are still that same green. Thin ice, deadly undertow.

"I had hoped that you would escape," she says.

Every nerve in Delphine's body is charged and sparking. Her shoulders press up against the door. She couldn't back down now if she wanted to. An animal would bare its teeth. She grins. "Sorry to have disappointed you."

Lorraine smiles back at her, brilliantly. Another step closer, and Delphine can smell her cologne and her sweat. All that cool marble skin can't contain the raw heat of her. "You didn't," she says. "You survived."

And they're kissing, as sudden and all-consuming as pure oxygen catching fire, Delphine up on her toes and clutching her fist in Lorraine's hair to pull her lower, kiss her harder. Hips grinding, breath pounding, the red walls hot and shining like the inside of a beating heart. Delphine arches off the door, pushing for more, more, and Lorraine gives it to her. Tongues and teeth. Hands under clothes, skin slick, slipping--

The shower beats down on them, freezing cold, miraculous. Delphine throws her head back, Lorraine biting at her throat. A chill on her skin, sirens in the distance. This is Berlin, this is what she knows of freedom--

Finally, they have to break apart for air. Lorraine in her soaking wet dress, breasts heaving with silent laughter--Delphine stares, longing for her camera. To keep her pinned right here, just like this. She touches Lorraine's shoulder, traces the thin silver line of a scar. "How long can you stay?"

"I've already stayed too long," Lorraine says.

Of course. She must have other places to be, people chasing her and people she's hunting. Delphine backs out of the spray of the shower and reaches for a towel. Tries to focus. She needs to get dressed and have a cigarette. She needs to do something about the broken window. To come down, somehow, from this fever dream.

In the mirror, she sees Lorraine stepping clear of the shower, brushing water off the vinyl of her boots. Coming up behind Delphine, winding a hand in her dripping hair, speaking close to her ear. "If you're anywhere near Marrakech, two months from now, we might cross paths. It would be interesting to be on the same side."

Delphine shivers. She lowers her eyelashes again, looks as innocent as she can with bruised lips and ravaged lingerie. "What are you asking me to do?"

"Only what you want to do. You're better than this."

With a flick of her wrist she indicates not just the tiny bathroom, or the hotbox flat, but all of Paris, stagnating, even summer flowers sickened in the unchanging air.

"And you could be better yet," Lorraine says. She takes the towel out of Delphine's grip and dries herself roughly, just her face and hair. "The heat will take care of the rest," she says, and snakes an arm around Delphine to pick up her guns.

Delphine grabs her by the wrist and turns, pressing up against her to demand one more kiss. It doesn't feel like goodbye. It feels like victory.

She walks Lorraine to the door. Then she crosses the room and stands beside the broken window, counting the seconds until Lorraine steps out onto the street below. She strides away without a backward glance, pale and polished in her black clothes, looking entirely untouchable. Her shadow stretches out behind her, darkness in her wake, until they both turn a sharp corner and vanish.

The sun still hasn't set. Delphine goes back to the cold shower.

She examines herself in the mirror, holding her shoulders straight and her head high. The scar on her neck is visible, but faint next to the fresh print of Lorraine's teeth. Tonight she will comb her hair back and wear the marks like jewelry. She'll walk the empty streets, find somewhere in this forsaken city where music is playing, and dance the summer down to its end.


End file.
